Arriving.

When I was a boy, I would take 45 minute showers. Something about the hot water hitting me that made me savor that kind of warmth as if it were the last time. I would spend 35 of those minutes covering my ears and slowly walking through the water—back and forth and back again—simulating a brief rainstorm hitting a shaky roof. In this story, my head is the roof. My brain, the interior with which I took up the most space. I suppose that hasn’t changed all these years.

I would close my eyes tight and fold my ears into themselves, leaving little room for either sense to live freely in the world. Standing at one end of the bathtub, I would slowly walk to the other side. The water falling would gradually climb up my lanky frame, the sound of the steady stream getting louder with each inch of movement. Eventually the water would pile on top of itself, pooling for small moments on my head, water unrelenting, and I would stand drowning the senses, hoping to feel it intensely all at once and and not at all.

15 years later, not much has changed. I don’t take 45 minute showers anymore. But the feeling part? That’s where I live a little.

The Robbie everyone knew all those years ago carried so much hope in his heart and so much despair in his lanky frame. He would have never known what was coming next in his life; all the hurt and all the growing into a body that he never understood would eventually feel less like a burden and more like a gift, no matter how awkward. Life brings bigger things: high school and love and loss and scars and love again and loss again and college and the greatest of friends, some not so great, too, and writing writing writing writingwritingwriting and brief moments of peace nestled between an anxiousness that would become a fluid state of the way life is lived and so many books and more love and loss and death and an ever-present sense of urgency and grief and, among many more things, a self-love that always feels like building. Always construction. Never finished and never intending to be. Building that always feels like arriving, every single day, to a structure that creates a space where love grows.

I still learn from that Robbie. He walks with me along the water, remembering the way he used to be. How afraid he was, a young boy, to let his words peel off the of the walls he built and let someone see him. He doesn’t say much in these moments. He’s where I learned how to leave no stone unturned in learning; how some of those rocks have lived inside of him for years without having ever been given a shot at being something more than just something to skip—not a mantle, not a road, not a decoration or trophy. He was where 27-year-old Robbie learned solitude as a way of breathing again, mask off, shield down, sword holstered.

Walking ahead of him now, I look back and see his eyes flicker, hands in pockets, chest pounding, and I think for a brief moment about the distance between us now. How grateful I am to have known him as he fades into my memory, slipping out of sight, and this is what peace is where the water falls.

There’s no real way we can know exactly what we’ll be doing in this brief and wonderful life, not a year from now, not a month from now. Our life twists every day—we are on the cusp of something bigger than ourselves. Whether you believe there is a higher being or a series of higher beings or nothing at all, there will always be an increasing urgency within us to love better, ourselves included, and to find hope whenever we can. Wherever we can.